U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks of Austin ruled Tuesday that women don't have to look at sonograms before getting abortions, or have a doctor describe what he sees.

But in the course of deciding whether to bar enforcement of the Legislature's new "sonogram" law, Sparks already made clear what images he doesn't want to see.

Sparks last week issued an order denying an effort by a conservative San Antonio outfit called the Justice Foundation to file a friend-of-court brief. In it, Sparks excoriated lawyer Allan Parker Jr., the foundation's president, who filed the request.

Because the order is so extraordinary, it is worth quoting at length. Sparks began by noting that he had already rejected two requests by other parties (one by state Sen. Dan Patrick of Houston) to file friend-of-court briefs, thereby turning down "two extremely tempting offers to transform this case from a boring old federal lawsuit into an exciting, politically charged media circus."

The judge said "any competent attorney could have predicted" another request would be denied.

"However, the Court is forced to conclude Allan E. Parker Jr., the attorney whose signature appears on this motion, is anything but competent," Sparks wrote. "A competent attorney would not have filed this motion in the first place; if he did, he certainly would not have attached exhibits that are both highly prejudicial and legally irrelevant; and if he foolishly did both things, he surely would not be so unprofessional as to file such exhibits unsealed.

"A competent attorney who did those things would be deliberately disrespecting this Court and knowingly shirking his professional responsibilities, offenses for which he would be lucky to retain his bar card, much less an intact bank balance."

Sparks concluded that he had too much on his plate to order a sanctions hearing "to address the self-serving entreaties of attention-seekers like Mr. Parker." He denied the request and ordered that one attachment be sealed.

Attorney defends self

I reached Parker on Thursday. He said he was "pretty shocked" at the language in the order.

He had recruited more than 300 women as "clients" who, he said, had had abortions and regretted that they hadn't been shown sonograms.

"Many had later seen a sonogram and were gripped with guilt over what they had done," he said. "They felt they were lied to."

In his filing, he presented comments from many of the women. He also presented an ultrasound picture of a 12-week old fetus.

But what was the photo that so enraged Sparks, the one that the judge sealed?

Cloven fetus

"It's a photograph, clearer than a sonogram, of an aborted baby," he said. "The baby had slice marks on it. It was pretty intact, but it clearly had been cut with the knife. The knife had gone through the chest cavity, so the chest was pretty much gone."

Sparks obviously did not see the relevance of a photograph of the results of an abortion in deciding whether the state has the right to, in his words, compel "physicians and patients to engage in government-mandated speech and expression."

Parker responded, "I thought it was relevant because abortionists use phrases that euphemistically try to obscure the truth, phrases like 'the products of conception,' or 'a blob of tissue.' "

The judge, though, didn't need a picture to alert him to the "euphemisms."

And he didn't want his court to be used for shock value.

Sen. Patrick's objection, for the record, was different. He wanted the judge to know he was wrong if he thought the bill would interfere with the doctor-patient relationship.

In most cases, he said, abortion doctors show up only minutes before the procedure and leave before the woman is out of recovery.